It is true that the "Collection" is interested far more in the ethnographic, rather than the economic side of the matter!

N.B. *charming definition!*

## CONCLUSIONS FROM "COLLECTION OF MATERIALS FOR THE STUDY OF THE RURAL LAND COMMUNE" — S. KAPUSTIN — ST. PETERSBURG 1882

Finally, the ethnography of our fatherland, having replenished its content with a mass of materials obtained from these investigations, suddenly grew, so to speak, to the possibility of undertaking already integral works on the study of extensive and complex phenomena of popular life. The most important of these works have been two: this is the investigation of the juridical customs of the people, undertaken according to the programme worked out in the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, and the investigation of the orders and forms of the rural land commune...

The working up of materials concerning the life of the Russian people is attended by considerable difficulties. The chief of these are, firstly, the extreme peculiarity of the way of life of our people, a way of life completely different, in its foundations, from our urban way of life, and the dissimilarity of our juridical conceptions and customs with the conceptions and customs of the people, and, secondly, a mass of contradictory, mutually inconsistent accounts of one and the same phenomena of popular life...

...the commune — this is everything that exists in the thoughts and actions of the rural people! this is a world of family, social relations; this is a world of all the moral and juridical conceptions arising from it; all religious world-outlook...

S. KAPUSTIN. --- WHAT IS THE LAND COMMUNE

...among us no one counts them as obligations, as, for example, the obligations to feed the hungry, to give shelter to the homeless. And indeed, if we sometimes do this, then we call this deed charity; no one and nothing can compel us to do this...

the matter of the distribution of lands does not constitute the essence of communal landholding...

and in the peasant commune it is otherwise:

*Where are the facts?*

...the entire system of repartitions in a normal commune, not split apart, not disorganized by the aggregate of many harmful conditions, is only a method of distributing land for its cultivation. This distribution has chiefly one aim: to give to each precisely so much land as he is able to cultivate in accordance with his personal qualities, his property-holding strength, the given household economy...

*rich thought!*

*) Here they are—the "conclusions": "repartition is the distribution of land for its cultivation"! Is this truly not the most empty tautology? Was it really unknown to anyone except Mr. Kapustin that repartition is distribution and that land serves for cultivation?

Outright falsity: Firstly, in 5 out of 10 communes described in the "Collection" [reckoning the Murasevskaya volost as 1 commune and discarding Lichkov's note*], land was not repartitioned since the X revision; the quantity of land, consequently, is determined by the number of revision souls. In 3 communes repartitions are by workers and in 2—by agreement: they discuss "land souls," remembering that "he who takes the land bears the tax" (Collection, p. 242). Secondly, the "chief aim" of land distribution is the payment of taxes. Proofs: land is taken away for tax arrears (mostly); the size of taxes for all together is proportional to the land share; in case of misfortune, decline of economy, etc., taxes are mostly not remitted (only in 2 communes—a one-year postponement, and in 1—a temporary exemption)—according to the rule "he who takes the land bears the tax."

*this is also in "the city" just the same even according to the X volume see note to p. 12*

*there are no "special principles" here at all*

The data of the "Collection" on the land commune allow one to elevate the concept of labor into one of the fundamental principles of all peasant life.

*so this is not the principle of personal labor, but the principle of serf labor*

In the repartitioning of strips, in the ceding of an allotment, the winter rye is removed for the benefit of the one ceding the allotment as having put labor into its cultivation, and for a plowed field, passing at repartitioning to a new owner, the latter is obliged to pay the former for the labor of plowing.

Land is taken away from a tax-defaulter only in case of his incapacity to labor upon it.

For any kind of work in the service of society, for service to it in any way, society rewards with a reduction of other communal works; it writes off, for example, carting duties.

In the execution of any kind of communal works by the whole society, the most strict accounting is made of the quantity of labor falling to the share of each.

In the mowing of a meadow by means of a summons with workers from each farmstead, they usually all work together...

...the principle of personal labor manifests itself as governing also in, for example, the fact that a member of society absent on permanent wage-labor pays the commune annually a known sum for the loss to society in his person of labor-power.

*Members of rural society engage in charitable acts incomparably more than each of the members of urban society...*

Thus indeed each member of society labors, going out to work for the plowing of a field or the harvesting of a crop for a stricken householder or poor widow, hauls timber for the building of a hut burned down for one of his fellow members, pays for plots set aside for the poor, the sick, the old, the orphaned, for timber given them free of charge for repairing a hut, material for fences and fuel, buries them at his own expense, contributes taxes for the ruined, furnishes horses for the working of the field of a householder whose horses have perished or been stolen, brings bread, linen and so forth to the burned-out person, feeds, clothes, shelters orphans settled in his hut, and does much else—each member of society does...

*in the majority of communes in the "Collection" this does not exist*